Main navigation

Breadcrumb

Three reasons Kindle trumps iPad

Apple's recently announced a new gadget for fanboys to jump at. The "iPad".

It's really the bastard-child of the Apple family, with no market segment to fill. An unimaginative name, with an unimaginative design (it's literally just an oversized iPod Touch).

So what's the iPad supposed to be? A glorified ebook reader? If that's the target market, then here's three reasons to buy a Kindle instead:

E-ink display
An LCD screen refreshes the content 60 times a second. In essence, 60 flickers per second. The end result of this is that your eyes fatigue far faster reading LCD screens than they do reading text off paper (think of something -- anything in nature that you look at for an extended period of time that flickers this fast).

E-Ink displays on the other hand, refreshes only when you turn the page. This makes for a more pleasurable reading experience, and makes it far easier for you to plough through that 200-page novel.

Battery life
A side-affect of not having to constantly refresh the display is you get whopping battery life out of E-ink displays. The Kindle will go 2 weeks between charges. Compare that to the iPad's paltry 10 hours -- presumably at minimal brightness. If you'd planned to load up your iPad with maps, you'd barely get a day of use.

Physical keys
You can't underestimate the power that physical keys has on your speed of data entry. Pecking out an email on a touch screen is frustrating to say the least. Humans operate significantly faster when given tactile feedback (that "press" you feel when you hit a key).

No doubt the fanboys will all rush out to buy themselves a new iPad. Apple's marketing hype really is second to none...